What is meta-ads-competitor-research?

A guide for researching competitors' advertising through Meta Ad Library, the public service that shows ads currently running on Meta platforms. It covers finding ads by keyword or Facebook page, reading saved results, and reviewing a specific ad.

Use it to build a swipe file, inspect a competitor's active ads, search by keyword or page, and analyze ads found in the library. It covers the process of collecting results, waiting for them, and reading the resulting dataset.

It helps avoid paying to collect the same public results again and limits scrapes to the amount of data needed. It also clarifies that the results are public and do not include private advertiser data.

meta-ads-competitor-research — Skill by byadsco/meta-ads-mcp

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add byadsco/meta-ads-mcp --skill meta-ads-competitor-research

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/byadsco/meta-ads-mcp

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/byadsco/meta-ads-mcp/meta-ads-competitor-research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/byadsco/meta-ads-mcp/meta-ads-competitor-research)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/byadsco/meta-ads-mcp/meta-ads-competitor-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/byadsco/meta-ads-mcp/meta-ads-competitor-research/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/byadsco/meta-ads-mcp/meta-ads-competitor-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/byadsco/meta-ads-mcp/meta-ads-competitor-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,319 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00000	$0.01319
Opus 5.5	$0.00000	$0.00528
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00000	$0.00264
Haiku 4.5	$0.00000	$0.00132

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 777fc2ea4d8c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

meta-ads-competitor-research scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/meta-ads-competitor-research/SKILL.md · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Competitor research through the Ad Library

The ads_library_* tools read the public Meta Ad Library through an Apify actor. They need no Meta permissions and see no private data: only what Meta itself publishes about ads currently running.

They do spend the advertiser's money. Read the cost section before the first scrape.

What it costs

About 0.75 USD per 1,000 ads, billed to the tenant's own Apify account. A hard spend cap derived from count is sent with every run, so a scrape cannot bill beyond what was asked for.

Reading a dataset that already exists is free. That matters more than it sounds:

ads_library_list_runs first. A previous scrape of the same page or keyword is free to read again.
Only scrape when nothing suitable exists.
Ask for the smallest count that answers the question. Twenty ads from one page usually settles "what are they running"; two thousand does not settle it better.

The tenant registers their own Apify token with ads_library_register_apify_token, or on the server's connections page. Without one, nothing here runs.

The sequence

ads_library_scrape — by query (keyword) or url (a Facebook page's Ad Library URL), never both. Returns a run_id and a dataset_id.
ads_library_get_run_status — poll until it succeeds. It reports what was charged.
ads_library_get_results — page through the dataset. Each item is a compact projection: page, format, dates, a media summary (image and video counts, whether it has video, when the CDN links expire) and its absolute offset.
ads_library_get_ad_details — one ad in full. Pass the offset as hint_offset to skip the dataset scan.

Step 3 is where you decide what deserves step 4. Pulling details for every ad in a dataset is slow and pointless; the media summary exists so you can choose.

ads_library_abort_run stops a run that is taking too long or was started by mistake.

Reading a scraped ad

ads_library_get_ad_details returns a readable card, the images inline, the videos as posters, keyframes or links, and the normalized record as JSON.

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

1mo ago Changed 777fc2ea4d8c
1mo ago First seen · 73 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 9d5af8c9ebe1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

meta-ads-competitor-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository byadsco/meta-ads-mcp (26 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,319 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-18.

Marketing and SEO

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